Category: Games

How To Be a Successful Gambler

Don’t gamble. Congratulations, you are more successful than most gamblers. Now onto the meat after you have had your vegetables.

 

IF you gamble the best way to do it is 1) spend a lot more time planning than playing, 2) practice in situations where there are no “real” stakes so that when you are playing at a higher level you at least have some built-in, reflexive pathways in your brain built up, 3) only play when at your best (rested, not stressed, not burnt out, 100% fresh), 4) SET A LIMIT (as in, if I win this much I’ll walk away, or if I lose this much I’ll walk away), without this you can win big but then play sloppy and lose big too, 5) know the math (you can be expected value positive, as in, if I could make this move an infinite number of times I would be making money) and recognize that luck is a huge factor.

 

With 5 as long as you know you made the right move you can walk away proud, vice versa if you win off of bad odds (you should feel ashamed :P). I would write more but I just found out my uncle Beaver is dying (just got the text). HE WAS AMAZING! A hunter/fisher/comedian, he always made me smile and laugh. “Hey hey hey” was sort of his catch phrase and I’ll never forget him.

Hearthstone Classic Meta 3

So I’ve identified some counters to the top classes and here’s a rough outline below.

Deck, Counter
Miracle Rogue, Freeze Mage

Druid, Control Warrior

Control Warrior, Miracle Rogue

Zoolock, Control Warrior

Freeze Mage, Control Warrior

Druid, Aggro Mage

 

I will say that there’s a difference between hard counter and soft counter. Control warrior is good against lots of decks but it’s not a hard counter to anything (maybe Freeze Mage). Control warrior, druid, and miracle are consistent against almost deck which is why the ladder is full of them.

 

In addition to this I’m still working on solving the game but so far focusing on different things to improve matchups (check out my github just google patruff and check out the hearthbreaker repo). Current ideas I have are to profile top players and capture their deck lists. Also I record my replays and I was thinking of making a “Mulligan quiz” phone app that would give several different ACTUAL matchups and then based on statistics of games dictate which cards should be kept. Like give the person information about the matchup, your deck, and then ask them how to mulligan.

History of Pokemon Go Part I

The periods of Pokemon Go have been, in my mind, following a hype curve akin to most new technology.

And thus, in the Summer of 2016 Pokemon Go was released. I would say there were many people who had been waiting for a game just like it. If you saw the Pokemon Go trailer it looked freaking awesome.

So I first heard about Pokemon Go from a work friend who has long since stopped playing (like most people), but he told me about it in the very early days, 2 days after the game came out. Augmented reality had been done before, but I hadn’t played any of those games (like Field Trip or Ingress). Anyway, I would say that if we look back to the hype curve, Pokemon Go arrived on the scene somewhere in the middle of its peak expectations.

THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA (A.D. 2016, July)

Pokemon came on the scene and in New York City it quickly took over en masse. People were talking about it, at first just the people who were gamers, but soon this spread to quasi-gamers, and faster than I had ever seen a game move, to casual people. I think I was just a bit too old to LOVE Pokemon growing up, I didn’t have Pokemon cards, and I only really got into the initial release on Gameboy. However, there is an entire generation of people who went absolutely wild over Pokemon the TV show, the card game, and of course the games themselves.

Because of all this merchandising and because Nintendo has tons of loyal followers (and it continues to release the same games over and over but on different, better hardware), people like me and younger (so mid-thirty somethings down to kids) have an appreciation if not a fondness for these artificially created creatures.

So the groundwork was lain by years of merchandising, nostalgia, and subliminal messaging that told us “GOTTA CATCH EM’ ALL.” Into this environment came the first game (to most of us) that relied on real-life locations and on other people that could interact with the same digital places, it was an augmented reality. Stepping into this, many people were amazed that their phone game had to be “played” by going outside, walking around, and randomly “encountering” Pokemon in the wild.

The world was not equal though, as many people found out that the places they lived had very few, if any, places of interest where Pokestops were.

On the other hand, living in New York City, it was Pokemon central.

In fact, on the topic of Pokemon central there was one video from early on in the Pokemon craze went viral. It took place in New York’s Central Park, the southeast corner (5th avenue and 59th street) where a junction of several Pokestops exist. This area was a hotbed for Pokemon Go, with the Pokestops being consistently lured (once I had stopped there at 3 AM on a Thursday and sure enough, all the stops were lured up) at all hours of the day.

So for the topic of the video, it was a somewhat rare Pokemon that appeared. It’s actually fairly easy to evolve from an Evee to a Vaporeon (you just name the Evee accordingly before evolving it, see below).

Anyway, at the time I think the trick was not well known and in most people’s eyes it was “hard” to get a Vaporeon. So in this vein, the formula of TONS OF PEOPLE + RARE POKEMON SIGHTING = HYSTERIA.

This scene was probably the most publicized, but during the 2nd age of Pokemon Go, which I’ll get to in my next post, scenes like the Vaporeon stampede, became all too common.

Video Game Music

So some good music that I find myself going back to over and over again would be the music from old 8-bit Super Nintendo games. The music on its own is great but the nostalgia also plays a big part in how much I like it. Here’s a small sampling of some great tracks. Feel free to post any good chiptune or other music in the comments below.

TPR’s melancholy mixes of old RPGs (here’s Chrono Trigger, but they are all good)

 

Zelda chiptune set by DJ Cutman

 

And lastly, there’s this Zelda Hyrule mix from Masikus that I happened to really like…